I was writing an email and faced the following situation:
I am coming to Oxford this summer. If you are still around, I would be glad to hang out with you.
Now normally we don't construct the conditional statement like the one above, where a present verb is followed by would. But if I change the second one to will it kind of becomes very direct and that's not what I want. So is the construction above still correct or should I go with something else? If it's correct, could someone explian the technical details behind it?
Best Answer
This is perfectly grammatical. You can use a present-tense verb with "if" to talk about the possibility of a future event - check out my answer on Future tense in conditional clauses for more details.
For the second clause, your intuition is correct; "would" and "will" mean the same in this context, but "would" is a little less direct.